Liberal Arts Mathematics

Spring 2021: I am teaching this course online and using Slack as the course website. We will use both Zoom and gather.town for the platform and have live sessions.

Logistics: This course will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:00 - 2:30pm PST. My teaching style is incredibly collaborative and much of the learning of the material is done with students in groups discussing the mathematics, as opposed to me explaining it via lecture in a video. I am tentatively scheduled to offer this class again in the fall and my recommendation is to only take this course if you can attend live sessions.

About the Course: This course, which requires no specific mathematical background, is an introduction to finite mathematics. The course will give an overview of topics in finite mathematics and their application to problems occurring in everyday life. Topics sampled will include combinatorics, graph theory, voting theory, and fairness. Time permitting, we will also look at examples from coding theory, design theory, cryptography, and others. The goal of this course is to lay the foundation for discovering applications of mathematics in a natural sense, through the investigation of finite mathematics. 

Here is the syllabus we will be using for this class.